Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness

An examination of the rise and influence of the internationally popular “queer TV China” genre.

Since the 2010s, Chinese television has seen an explosion in popularity in dramas featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQIA-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines, even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated sizable transcultural queer fan communities both online and offline. Still, these seemingly progressive TV productions are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking up the many definitions of “queer,” this book counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the primary lens to understand nonnormative identities and desires in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the impact of various genres, narrative tropes, censorial practices, and fandoms on subject formation and desire within heteropatriarchal Chinese broadcasting.